Studying Language in Its Social Context

Language by its nature is social—a language that isn’t used by anyone anymore is considered to be dead. It’s strange then that the study of language in its social context is relatively recent and is often treated as a peripheral subject (if it’s taught at all) in linguistics programmes and departments. While the roots of studying language in its social context go back to the beginnings of linguistics, since the middle of the twentieth century the dominant paradigms that developed in linguistics have treated language as a system to be studied on its own, without consideration for the contexts in which it’s used.